December 10, 2008

I have had these 3 keyboards since I was sick. When I got them the farthest away worked fine and the closest just needed to be tuned up and the middle one didn't work at all. I went through various stages including one point where all three stopped working! @#$%$U&^*

Anyway, they are all ready to go home now. For a minute there, I thought I might actually be the charlatan I'm afraid of being...

Quickly of interest there are two 221s and one 219.

The 219 is serial number 5, evidently the last one ever made. It's actually a great keyboard, 48 keys laid out like a piano, 8 keys with individual tuning, 2 pairs of awesome benders and 3 kays with pressure and trigger outs. It's 4 voice polyphonic! I don't know if one could get analog oscillators to track close enough to actually play chords, but maybe with 259Es. The Joysticks light up. They're made from a plexiglass stick glued to a Davies Molding knob that uses a tiny incandescent light bulb as the ball in a "ball and socket joint." Four photo resistors get exposed the light from that bulb to change the resistance and give CV output. Wild.

The 221s are exceptional in that they are the only Buchla touchplate keyboards that DO NOT have trim pots on all the keys. Its a slick design, sadly it uses a few rare parts, so it's not really clone fodder. I don't know that I like the idea of having all those buttons that are useless, since they were intended to control a 300 computer. The joystick is normal on this one, but these two have different length sticks. If you leave space on the sides put a light in the boat, you can move the whole keyboard left and right to get additional bending. That Buchla thought of everything....

I'll put up some pictures of the guts in the next couple days. What a load off. Now I can clear up some space for the next wave...

I'm sure that's all correct.. that is what the former owner told me as well... I can't remember which # mine is.

i assume that a lot of the garage sale stuff were modules that were assembled and didn't work correctly or were returned/swapped by customers for working versions when they failed in the field. I think the one you had didn't work right and wasn't looked into until it was rebuilt in 2004. sure is a nice!

#s in buchla land can be deceiving .. the #5 could mean a lot of things.. perhaps it was the 5th made, maybe the 5th shipped.. perhaps the 5th returned? perhaps its the 8th made and Don wrote #5 on it to confuse future bloggers